AI, Automation, and the Headless Agency Model with Melissa Elizondo

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I find it difficult to have this conversation with people because they look at me like I've just fallen out of an episode of the Jetsons. They just don't. They can't get their head around it. And I think people are. I don't think people are scared of AI. I think people are genuinely scared of who am I if I'm not stuck to a computer. Welcome to the Agency Hour. My name's Troy Dean. I'll be your host today. And today we have a very special guest, Melissa Elizondo, who I met a few days ago in a Slack community. And you know, every now and then you meet someone who, who is just singing from the same hymn book and saying the same thing that you're saying. And I reached out to her and I said, hey, I love what you're talking about here. It's all about AI. It's about the future of computing and the future of the way that we are gonna interact with each other on the Internet. Without screens, without keyboards, without mice, without devices, without phones. What does a wearable future Internet look like? I've been talking about headless a lot recently, which is the separation of the back end and the front end. A lot of big companies, including Salesforce, Meta, Ontraport, they're all telling us they don't want us to log into their UI anymore. They don't want us to log into the front end of the website. They want us to deploy our agents directly into their database via their MCP or their API and get work done without us logging into the ui. Melissa runs a one person marketing agency out of Texas. It's her and her AI running the business. So I'm very excited to introduce you to Melissa Elizondo. Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast. Who are you, where did you come from and what are you doing here? [00:01:32] Speaker B: I don't know. Oh, how did I get here? Am I on the right place? I don't know. I met you through an AI thing that we're doing together and we're geeking out together. And so we started talking online and we were like. And then you just said, will you come on my podcast? I said, sure. [00:01:47] Speaker A: It's. I mean, what an amazing time to be alive. What an amazing time to be alive, right? We just met in a. In a. In a Slack community. We were talking. You said some really interesting things. We were kind of like, you know, jamming with each other with ideas. And I'm like, okay, this, this AI is so new and there are like so few people now. You. You are marketing agency background as well. So there's so few people in the agency space, I think that have really got their head around what the future of AI looks like. And so when I was reading some of the things you were saying, I'm like, I want to have this conversation because I don't know. I don't know about you, but I feel like. I feel like I've kind of slipped into a secret doorway somewhere and I'm in the future and there's no one there yet. And I'm. And so when I find someone, I'm like, hey, is it just me or is like, is this something going on? [00:02:34] Speaker B: Yeah, no, same, same. So I do a lot of speaking events and I, I did three this week and I find there's really no. A lot of people are what I would call level one AI. Right. The chat GPT, they still put something in, expect something to come out and copy and paste it somewhere. And most of them are just using it for emails. Right. And arguing with your spouse, even though that's just your AIs arguing with each other. So. [00:03:01] Speaker A: Yep. [00:03:02] Speaker B: And then this year, what I'm seeing, starting the end of last year and right now, I think we're going to trend into this AI agent space and everybody's teaching it, including myself. And so, you know, build your. Build your agent and open in cowork or in code or an open claw or whatever. And so. And then a lot of people are doing that. So I've met a lot of people this week. Why don't you say a lot of people? Pretty much one person in every event that I've gone to is like, I'm building something in cowork or code or open claw. And they're frustrated. It takes time. [00:03:40] Speaker A: Yep. [00:03:40] Speaker B: They haven't got it honed in yet. And then I'm over here saying, I have an AI agent for you. Like, I could literally give it to you today and you can bypass all this. You could skip the line and your. Your prayers will be answered. [00:03:55] Speaker A: Yeah, 100. I mean, I spoil. I mean, I think we should. Spoiler alert. Right. I think we should like tell people what we're talking about. So I discovered this app called Victor a few weeks ago. A friend of mine sent. Sent me a recommendation in messenger, said, oh, by the way, have you seen Victor? And I'm like, oh, here we go. Another AI thing. And so the, the. The. And I was the same. I had gone down the road of looking at openclaw. Couple of caveats for me that just kill openclaw, straight off the bat is it has to be hosted on your computer. And I travel with my young family. If I'm up in Queensland on holiday and there's a power outage in the building, which there has been before, then my business is, is, Is gone. It comes to a halt because, you know, I don't have a backup generator. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want it on my computer. I want it in the cloud. I want it in Slack because that's where I live, and I want my team to have access to it because I don't want to be the bottleneck. And so Victor plugs into Slack and then has over 3,000 native integrations with all of the apps we already use, right? Including Meta ads and ClickUp and Asana and Google Docs and like, you name it everything. And so you just talk to Victor and tell it what you want it to do, and it doesn't. [00:05:07] Speaker B: Even if it doesn't have the integration on the back end, if you can get an API key, you just give Victor the API and he hooks himself up. [00:05:16] Speaker A: That's right. [00:05:16] Speaker B: That's genius. And if you can't do that, he has a cloud computer, give him a login and he'll. [00:05:22] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. So I think, so I think, I think before we, before we dive into what's possible and what kind of like, I feel like the clouds have parted, right? And I feel like there's a, There's a few of us that have seen the light. And I don't mean to be kind of elitist about this, but I think the people are so busy and they feel like they're using AI to make themselves more productive. But I see this happening all the time, is someone will use some AI, they'll get a little bit of time back, and then what they do is they just use that time using more AI, right? And so I don't really, I don't, I don't think anyone. Right, well, so there's, there's very few. I, I, in fact, I don't know anyone who's kicking back two days a week drinking pina coladas because the robots are doing everything right. I think everyone's just like, filling in that time, you know? And I think the problem is, I saw a post in my, my feed the other day. The problem is this guy was bragging about having 147 agents in his business, right? I'm like, dude, I couldn't think of anything worse because now you need A spreadsheet and a robot to tell you what each agent does. It's like that's just a management nightmare. And so the thing that I've learned in the last few months is there's a difference between an agent and an orchestrator. And typically like openclaw is an orchestrator, so you will give opencloud instruction. Then an openclaw goes and triggers a whole bunch of sub bots or sub agents to do the thing. And I think of Victor as my orchestrator. Victor is my personal assistant. I tell Victor what I want done and it happens. But I think before we dive into that, it's probably just worth unpacking the technical aspects a little bit here. And so just bear with me while I do like a 32nd 101. Essentially what's happening is with something like Victor or Main Us, if anyone's used Main Us or Perplexity Computer, effectively what you're doing is you're renting space on someone else's computer in the cloud that is running on the Ubuntu operating system, which is a Linux operating system that most AI runs on. And there's a bot on that computer which has a filing system set up. And in that filing system is a whole bunch of instructions on what they should do. So think about it like hiring a new employee, onboarding them into Slack, giving them access to Google Drive, and the first thing they read is an instructions file. Right? Your job is to write blog posts for our clients. Here are the instructions. Oh, and by the way, here are all the client details for all the clients that we write blog posts for. So when you're writing a blog post for this client, go look up their details. Here's what you need. Here's access to our keyword research tool. Go and do the keyword research. And so you're literally laying out the instructions like an sop. But they're called skills files. And the robot follows the process. Now, the good thing is, typically speaking, robots are very good at following a process consistently. Way better than humans. They tend to improve the process over time without you asking. They don't take sick days, they don't complain about their boyfriend. They don't, you know, they're not in a bad mood. They don't stand around the water cooler and chat and waste time. And there's a lot of benefit. So I just wanted to kind of explain that technically that's what's happening when you're using something like Victor, right? It's not on your computer, it's in the Cloud. And these guys have just very cleverly put a slack wrapper around it so that we can literally just talk to it. I use whisper flow all the time. So I just hit a button on my keyboard, I talk to Victor, and shit happens, right? It's just like. It's the future, dude. So now you told me you're running and happy again to edit any of this out, if you don't want me to mention it, but you told me you're running a marketing agency with, like, you and Victor running your entire marketing. Right? Okay, so tell me what. So what does Victor do for you? What's Victor actually doing? [00:08:56] Speaker B: So Victor is right now. I do a lot of organic SEO paid ads. I build websites. That's a big thing for me. That's probably my number one moneymaker. And so he's taking each client, he's writing three social media or three blogs every week. He's actually doing it all at once and scheduling them out and then running all the optimizations through another tool that I have, which is Search Atlas. And so I use Search Atlas SEO. He's running that for me. I used to pay people to do that. He's just like, getting in there and doing it for me. Now I'll give you a story. So I had a client who I was running some Google Ads for, and I set them up myself. Normally I pay somebody to do that, but I was like, it was a small budget and I was like, you know what? I'll do it myself. I'm already doing other stuff for her. So I messed it up. I literally messed it up. Started over three times. It was a whole mess. So it's running for about two weeks, I think. And she ends up emailing me right when I'm in the middle of a big AI challenge online. And I just do not have time to email her back. She emails me a second time two days later. And a third time two days later, kind of like, hey, what's going on? I'm. I'm looking, I'm not seeing anything. My phone's not ringing. And I. I just did not have time. Well, I had just gotten Victor the weekend before, and so I said, victor, can you. Do you have the ability? Because I don't know at this point, do you have the ability to go check these ads and just see what might be wrong with them so I can fix them? And he was like, yeah, on it. He went in, checked him, and said, I found the problem. You didn't do this. Basically, you told me what I did. Wrong. He said, do you want me to fix it? I said, yes, please. And so he went in, fixed all my ads. And then the next day, they started performing the next day. And so the client's phone starts ringing. She's really happy. So the other thing I have Victor doing is he sends. Traditionally, an agency will do marketing for a month, and then at the end of the month, send a report to a client. That's how I always did it. I don't know if everybody else did. Yeah. I'm having Victor send weekly emails to the client. So every Friday, they're getting, you know, the keywords that work, how many, you know, keywords they're ranking for now, what they're on the first page of Google for the blogs that are getting the most traction, and then the ads, you know, their analytics and their ads. And he's sending that every Friday for the clients. And so I'm. I'm talking to them more than I ever did. I'm not, but Victor is, you know. [00:11:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:22] Speaker B: And so he's handling all that for me. I actually. So I don't know how other agencies handle this, but when I'm building a website for a client, I know how to do a lot of it, but I mainly hire subcontractors, usually out of Philippines or Pakistan or whatever. And the guy that I use in the Philippines, he usually charges me $250 to do a website. However, it's going to be one or two weeks before I get the first draft, and then I'm going to go back and forth with client, type in some changes, and it may be another one or two weeks, and depending on how slow the client is, we might not have a website live for like, three months. And we just don't live in that world anymore. And today I literally gave Victor a website. I gave him a WordPress instance, gave him the information about the client, what they wanted, and he built a website from the ground up in WordPress. I just gave him a login that cost me $183, but I got it in 30 minutes. [00:12:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. That's right. [00:12:24] Speaker B: 30 minutes. And I just think. I think the patience that people have is going to change. It's going to shorten, you know, three months for a website, great. But not anymore. I just think that's going to change for everybody. [00:12:36] Speaker A: Not anymore. And you know what? Like, we live. I mean, my kids are eight and six now, right. And we live in an on world. And so we're like, constantly, whenever they want to watch tv we're constantly like, okay, you can, but now you have to watch what, what we call free to air TV in Australia. So, like, whatever's on is on. You can't, you can't just go to Netflix and just dial up a show you want to watch. You just have to watch ABC Kids, which everyone, every parent in Australia knows. ABC Kids, it's just like the public broadcaster, they play cartoons, it's super friendly. But whatever's on is on. You can't skip ahead, you can't go back, right? And so we're trying to train them that sometimes you listen to the radio, you don't know what's going to come on. You just have to enjoy the show that comes on. And yes, we have Spotify and yes, we have Netflix, but the whole on demand culture is something that I didn't grow up with. And so, you know, if you think about Uber, you think about Spotify, you think about Netflix, you think about Uber Eats. I remember, I remember when Uber Eats first started delivering groceries here in Australia, right? And I have two kids at that point. I had two kids under the age of five. And we've run out of nappies and we've run out of toilet paper and we've run out of oat milk and we've run out of a whole bunch of stuff. And my wife's out and I've got two. And I'm like, I'm not going to the supermarket with these two demons. Are you kidding me? That is just hell on earth. So I call Uber Eats and you know, an hour later, $200 worth of groceries turn up on the front door. It's like a miracle. And so the consumer expectation now is that especially also everyone's using ChatGPT, that, hey, I've got to write this really complex email to a client or a colleague or I put in a chatgpt and within a couple of minutes I've got a great response that is better than I would have done myself. And so when you say to someone it's going to take three months to build their website, they're looking at you going, melissa, why is it going to take three months to build a website? That just doesn't make any sense. And it's because of that back and forth with the contractor in a different time zone. [00:14:23] Speaker B: So I'm curious, you have other clients and other projects, correct? [00:14:28] Speaker A: Right. Whereas AI can run, you know, can build four or five websites at the same time. Right. Can manage a whole bunch of campaigns at the same time, can write four blog Posts at the same time for different clients. I just want to unpack something though, because building the website in WordPress is, this is, you know, we have a large agency community and so I've got a lot of agencies saying to me, well, this is fine for doing content, it's fine for doing emails, fine for doing ad campaigns. Meta just released their MCP server on the 29th of April. And so now what Meta are saying is, hey, we don't want you logging into the ui. We want you actually using your agents to run ad campaigns. Right. But a lot of my agencies are web design agencies. I grew up in the WordPress space and a lot of our agencies are WordPress web designers. And they're saying, well, how does AI build a website? There's a, there's a bunch of WordPress AI tools on the market that allow you to vibe code a website. What did Victor actually do in this WordPress website for you that, that it built? Like, I'm curious, was it just the API or was it a browser login that it used? How did that work? [00:15:31] Speaker B: He went into his browser and logged in. I gave him a login to the WordPress site and he loaded a theme. [00:15:39] Speaker A: Wow. [00:15:39] Speaker B: And he built it. [00:15:41] Speaker A: Wow. [00:15:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And I went and looked at it because I needed to edit something on it and I just wanted to make sure it was easy. And it was like he did what any developer would do. [00:15:50] Speaker A: Wow. [00:15:53] Speaker B: Let's stay with websites for a minute. So there's some agencies just like mine and others that are really upset about AI websites and like the Lovables. And I love loveable, let me just say I love Lovable. I think that's a great website builder. And if you program it correctly, you can put your AI or your SEO stuff in it. You can tell it to be SEO optimized, you can hook it up to something like Search Atlas. You can still do all the things that the client needs. But I think I saw a post in a group this morning, some a web developer. All the news feelings about the fact that, you know, he was dogging the AI websites. And I thought, here's what this just did for the small business owner. It just leveled the playing field. Yep, they can have a $10,000 looking website with AI today. I'll give you an example. So my mom, my mom's 68 and she just had an accident in January, broke her neck. And so she moved in with me recently and she has a nonprofit and she's been a truck driver for 50 years. And so that ended her Career. And so now it's time to like she's. Yeah, she's sad, I get it. And she's definitely mourning that. But she has a non profit that she's always asked me to help her on, you know, for free. And so, you know, she's offered to pay, I will say that. So she's, you know, she needs social media, she needs help writing emails, finding grants, writing grants. And there was a very specific website that she wanted that I couldn't build, my developers couldn't build. She's paid people, I paid people. And what it was is she. Her non profit helps veterans and one of the fundraisers at the end of the year there's an organization called Wreaths Across America and they come and put, they look like Christmas wreaths but basically they're, they call them remembrance wreaths and they do it in December and it's a national thing to do at all national cemeteries. And so she wanted to do one in San Antonio. So she wanted to adopt this cemetery in San Antonio. She wanted something to scrape the cemetery's website, get all the veterans that are buried there and have it where people could adopt them. And then when they adopted him, they get a certificate and all this other stuff. We just never, we have not been able to build it in five years. And so I set her down last week and I said, I started it in lovable just to make sure it could happen. And then I set it down, I put her at her computer and I gave her whisper flow and I said just talk to it, just tell it what you want and hit the enter button. And a day and a half later she stayed up late that night. A day and a half later she had the website she's been wanting for five years. Yeah, exactly. Perfectly fine. I, I did the last minute tying the bow on it, you know, connecting her stripe and all that but, and making it live. But she got that then, you know, I gave her Victor. So Victor went and found grants for her, helped her write the grants, like wrote her speeches for the ones that had to do videos. Like, I mean, yeah, Victor is a big deal, you know, and I'm, I'm showing 60 something, 70 year old people Victor and they're geeking out because I'm giving them a gift. [00:19:05] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. A couple of things I want to talk about in terms of like you, you write that AI is leveling the playing field. It's not only, you know, I've been saying this for a long time. I think if you're, if you earn money by clicking a mouse button or tapping on a keyboard. You have to skill up, right, because the robots are doing that work. And Salesforce released Headless360 a couple of weeks ago. Meta have released their MCP. All. You know, Ontraport just released an MCP. I saw it in my feed yesterday. All the big companies employ hundreds and thousands of developers to work on the front end of their of their website, right? So Meta has thousands of developers on staff that basically build the UI for the ad manager so that we can log in and give them money and run ads. Well, all those developer jobs are going to go away because three years from now there'll be no UI to log in and run ads. We'll all be doing it via the database. And so I just want to explain this concept of headless to people, which is, you know, headless in old school terms is the separation of the back end and the front end of a website. And so it sort of came out when a lot of websites are driven by a content management system like WordPress. And typically what happens is when you look at a website, the website is talking to the database in real time and is building a web page in front of you based on the data in the database. And that slows things down. So the concept of headless is, hey, we can put stuff in the back end and put a blog post and testimonials and update stuff in the back end, but the front end is just going to be rendered once a static HTML and you know, it's way faster, it's way more secure, there's a whole bunch of benefits. So the whole world is going headless. And what that means is that if any, if you've ever used Canva to design something, well now you can just talk to Victor and Victor can just go in and design it in Canva. So you don't need to log into the front end of the website anymore. And these big companies are now telling us in the agency and the developer community that they don't want us to log in. They're telling customers, don't log into the front end of our website. Just use your agent, use Claude code, use ChatGPT, they've all got connectors, use Victor and just tell it what you want and have it log in and do the thing for you and then bring it back. And so the other thing that I think AI does is it allows small business owners to do things that were previously out of reach. So it allows a small business owner to run a video campaign on Facebook or Instagram without hiring a video crew, because we just can't afford $30,000 for a film crew to come and make a great video. Right. And so you can do that for 35, $40 in credits in Higgs Field or something and put together a great video and, you know, use that to promote your business. So things that were previously out of reach to small business owners are now possible. A couple of things I want to just touch on Victor, and this isn't an ad for Victor, by the way, but, you know, we're both Victor users and we've seen the power of it. Victor will do things that I'm discovering that Victor can do things that I didn't even know it could do. Right. And so Victor has a whole bunch of stuff baked into it. It has a lot of the, you know, it can create AI videos, it can trim audio, it can produce your podcast. I could give Victor the recording of this podcast and say, make Melissa and me sound podcast quality, trim out any filler words, do all that, and within probably five or six minutes, it would spit me back a wav file and it would be done and it would be perfect. Right. And it would cost me. I don't. Maybe three or four dollars in credits. Right. I mean, it's crazy. So the question becomes then, if AI is doing all of this stuff, what do we do as humans? What do you think our job is three years from now? What's our job? If AI is just going to take the keyboard and the mouse away from us? What do you think our job is? [00:22:56] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question, because I. I do feel like you and I are in this opportunity zone where we are consulting and we're telling people and we're selling a Jewish. Like we go into big companies and we install Victor and hook it up and do all the things because we know it's possible. What they don't know yet, or at least what I'm finding, because not a lot of people are ahead of it like we are. What you were talking about earlier, Skills, Right. I'm having to explain skills. And part of, I think what we'll do, even though Victor can build skills, I think knowing how to talk to any AI and knowing how to bring your. Your expertise into it of what you've seen work and building skill set based on what you know, works, I think that would be one of the ways that we'll probably be serving in the next few years is we'll know how to talk to the AI, because think of where we're at today we're five years into chat, GPT coming out on the market, right? And we, and I. And I'm shocked that there's still people just now using it and, and geeking out about custom GPTs. Like that was a three year ago project, you know, like we were doing custom GPT three years. I'm happy to take you back there if you want to, you know, get comfortable. Custom GPTs. I'll show you how to do it, you know, and great. You stay there because maybe they don't have the money to have Victor run for them constantly. Totally fine with me. But I still think there's this gap of this adoption rate that it's taken. Five years ago I was telling people you have to use this. And people were love or hate it, right? They had opinions about it, including my own. And now people love it. They just don't know how to use it. They don't know what it's capable of. And they're slowly putting their toe in the water. And I, I don't know. I don't. I know it will compound on itself. Like it will, it will go. I mean, AI is already compounding on itself how quickly it changes. But I think as long as you and I stay ahead of the game and we know what's coming immediately, when it's coming, that you and I would. And people like us will be the microphones for the marketplace and we'll tell them, here's what's new, here's what it can do now. And so I think, I think that's where you and I will make money, is we have experience in marketing and we can help marketing like you marketing agencies and me, small businesses. But I think it's going to get bigger than that. I think we'll just kind of be. I think you and I are just curious enough to, to, to grab this bull by the horn and we're just going to ride it out, you know, until we can't anymore. I just, I was watching Tony Robbins had a AI challenge a week or two ago and one of the speakers was the head of OpenAI's launch. I don't remember what department he was in. It was a great speech. And basically he gave a speech that he says in the near future, kind of to your point is we will be screenless. He said there will be a point where we'll just have wearable AIs, which I've had a wearable AI for a freaking year and a half. Like the computer came out, they're out Of California. They got bought by Amazon last year. $49. I freaking wear it everywhere. And it connects with Victor. And literally I just. Everything like, what's it called? It's called B E dot computer. [00:26:20] Speaker A: Wow. [00:26:21] Speaker B: This is how I do my life now. I go to meet with a client and I do. I don't even take a notebook. I literally just ask questions. And I'm present because I make sure the green lights on. But I'm like, asking questions. How does your process work? What happened? How do you get the lead in? Then when the lead comes in, what do you do with it? Where does it go? And I'm just asking questions about their process. And so this is what I did for a welding company the other day. So this is a welding company that does 5 million a year, and so still kind of mom and pop. The owner's wife is one of my friends, and she does all the payroll and office work. So I went to meet with her and I sat with her for three hours while she told me the whole business, while I just listened. And then I hooked up Victor for her. And I. And I sat at her desk while she had her phone through all the authentication. And I just like hooked up all her tools. And then I took the transcript because it's an app on my phone. And I. I emailed it to her, sent it to Victor, loaded in Victor, and he immediately knew what her problems were. And he offered he. Because what she's telling me, I mean, they do it very archaically. So she says her welders, they work on big, like, refineries and plants and stuff. So a plant will call and she'll send a guy out and they'll write down on a piece of paper how many guys it will take and how many days and send her a picture of it. And so she gets a picture on her phone, and then she puts it in Google or. Yeah, Google Drive. Then she prints it. Then she has a spreadsheet, and each plant has a different rate per hour, plus different per diem, plus different travel. And she has on numerous occasions, accidentally put the wrong number in the wrong field. [00:28:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:03] Speaker B: And then she turns up this estimate and she says, and when we, you know, I'll get this number, then I'll go over here to Word Doc and we'll, you know, we have a template, and I make sure I always put 30% down as required. And she opens one up, and 30% down is not in it, you know, and so it's just this human error. If she's losing sleep at night, she goes, oh, my gosh, I'll wake up in the middle of night thinking, oh, my God, did I overpay Jose? You know? And so when Victor gets the transcript, his first suggestion is to do a payroll audit for her, because that spreadsheet translates to payroll, and they write checks every Friday. And so he's like, why don't we just do a payroll audit? I'll double check all your spreadsheets. And I told her, I said, all you have to do is tell it how you do it. Tell him how you do it. Allow him to give you a better way if you're ready for it. I was like, he'll create a skill out of it and then let him do it, you know? And, yeah, I. I've installed Victor for 22 people as of yesterday. And every one of them has texted me or called me or emailed me telling me how much they love Victor and they cannot imagine life without him. And they're all different. He does different things for each of them. He's very custom, optimizable. And it's crazy. Like, somebody asked me today because I'm going to do a workshop for contractors. He was like, what exactly would Victor do for them? I was like, depends. It really depends on what their business is, you know, and what their pain points are. He'll serve in whatever fashion he needs to, you know. Yeah. [00:29:36] Speaker A: There's so much I want to unpack here. And, you know, I feel like. And this is why. This is why when we started talking, I just knew straight away I wanted to get you on the podcast, because there's. There are. I fundamentally believe in the concept of spatial computing. It's already happening. I'm a big advocate for spatial computing, which basically means that we'll be interacting with the Internet using wearables. We won't need a screen, we won't need a keyboard, we won't need a mouse. It'll be a watch. It'll be the B computer, the Apple watch, whatever it is. The glasses that you wear will be. I mean, these are just reading glasses, right? But these will be. They'll have microphones and cameras in them. I mean, Meta are already doing this with Ray Ban and Oakley. So when, you know, my Oscar's eight now, Right. [00:30:19] Speaker B: I'm gonna get some of those, just so you know. [00:30:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So my boy's almost nine when he's. I mean, I'm at the school with all the parents and they're like, oh, how are we gonna make sure our kids don't get Addicted to phones. I'm like, dude, that's not the problem. When our kids are teenagers, these won't even be around. Phones will be in the museum, right? We'll go to the museum 10 years from now and go, oh, remember the iPhone? Wasn't that thing cute? That by the way, had a lifespan of about 30 years. From the moment this thing came out until the moment it's going to be obsolete. It's going to be about a 30 year lifespan. Think about that, right? Like that's how fast. Imagine going and looking at a car in the museum and going, oh, remember when we used to drive cars? How long cars been around? Like 120, 130 years, right? I don't know, maybe longer. The phone, right? [00:31:02] Speaker B: So the phone Happen to know 1911 is the year 1911, okay? [00:31:06] Speaker A: So 115 years. The iPhone, which was a revolutionary piece of technology, is going to have a shelf life of about three or four decades, right? Because it'll be wearable. It'll be completely wearable. And this is more disruptive than the Internet, right? I look at the city of Melbourne and I look at all of these high rise office buildings that are post Covid, are half empty because everyone's working from home. When we unlock spatial computing, those office environments, if they, if they stay the way they are, they're going to have to change to like be, you know, public green space and a work environment that is like, oh, you just don't need desks anymore. You don't need a desk. That is the point, right? Like do not, don't buy shares in an office furniture company, right? Because they won't be here in five years time because you won't need a desk, because you won't need anywhere to put your computer. You might need a desk to sit down and write and do some handwriting if you want to, to practice that craft, right? Which is a dying art. But you won't need a desk because you'll be interacting with the computer, with the Internet, with your wearables. There's already over a million apps in the Apple app Store that are optimized for Apple glasses. So you can already put smart glasses on and read your email as a holograph in front of you, right? The problem is I find it difficult to have this conversation with people because they look at me like I've just fallen out of an episode of the Jetsons. They just don't. They can't get their head around it. And I think people are, I don't think people are scared of AI I think people are genuinely scared of who am I if I'm not stuck to a computer. Like in developed economies, we have spent the last 40 years inputting data into computers and having the computer do something and reformat the data and spit it out in a different format. Think about building a website. That's what we do, right? Like we put data in and a website appears in the browser. We don't do that anymore. Victor does it or Manus does it or Perplexity or some or B computer. Right. [00:33:05] Speaker B: That, that Tony Robbins thing. That same guy said that he really thinks websites are going away because when the website first came out, it was just a place for white paper studies and then Harvard got into it and they gave their information and then it developed into what we have today. But he thinks it'll go back to just being data. So as a business, you'll load up all the data about yourself. Kind of like what we do on the back end with SEO, right. And then you're wearable. We'll go find the business. [00:33:32] Speaker A: That's right. [00:33:33] Speaker B: Oh, you need a plumber, you know, and that's the other thing, those service. I mean, I think I will, you know, get into the service companies, but I do think that plumbers will make more money than lawyers. I think that, I think the trades will actually come back and working with your hands and things like that are going to be. You'll pay more for a human than 100%. [00:33:57] Speaker A: I agree. I mean I have web design, large seven figure a year web design agencies in our programs who are now telling their clients stop. You don't need a website, right? What you need is you need to look at your information architecture. You need to look at how your content in your business answers questions that are being asked by consumers. Whether Your consumer is B2C or B2B or in this case with this agency. I'm thinking about, they do a lot of work with research organizations right now. Research organizations. Their business model is they get funded, they get paid funding for published research. So their business model is finding researchers that they can fund. It's kind of like a book publisher, right? Let's go find an author that can, you know, we pay them in advance, they do the research, they come back and present the white paper, we publish it and then we get the funding from the government for publishing that research paper. But they don't have researchers on staff, Right. They outsource and they have relationships with the researchers that do the actual research. The UI of their website is completely irrelevant. Three years from now, it doesn't matter what their website looks like. The only thing that matters is when a researcher who needs funding because that, that you know, to do what they do when they're online and they're researching. Hey, who are the organizations that are funding research at the moment? They'll be interacting directly with ChatGPT or Mainus or Perplexity Computer or their wearable or they'll ask B Computer, who are the organizations that have funding rounds coming up. [00:35:28] Speaker B: What's your website design? [00:35:29] Speaker A: Does not matter what your website looks like. In fact, in fact, images and, and you know, CSS animations and all that kind of shit are just going to get in the way. It's just going to slow down. Like there's two, there's two things that your website needs to do right now. One is it needs to be optimized for large language models. That is like the number one. It needs to be optimized so that your content is written in a way and is answering the questions that are being asked. And you know, the beginner trick for everyone is just add an FAQ section to the end of every blog post, right? That's like 101. And the second thing is that if you are going to continue to have a website with some kind of user interface, just strip it back and make it super fast on mobile. That's all that matters, right? And then five years from now, it won't even need to be on mobile because it'll be a data. There'll be a data, a data bin or a data dump somewhere that you will feed your data into that all the large language models and all the agents get their information from. And it doesn't matter what it looks like because no one's going to be visiting your website anyway. [00:36:33] Speaker B: Literally. So I stumbled across that a year and a half ago. So I was working for an insurance agency as their marketing director and a magazine came out from this guy in North Carolina who says that he gets 100% organic traffic from his website. And of course I put it. I don't believe him. So I put it into Semrush just to see how many keywords he's ranking for. And it was like 2,783. And all of them were from blogs, all of them. And we as an agency who'd been around for 100 years were ranking for like 74. It was like all our name. Like, it was terrible. And so I went and looked at his blogs and every one of them, the title of the blog was a question Somebody would ask Google, which was like, what does home insurance include? And you know, like he had three blogs about home insurance with questions. He'd answer it right away, then have a key takeaway, then have the blog. And at the very bottom, he had three people also asked questions. That's literally what he named it. People also asked. I was like, that is freaking genius. Because when you go to Google, what do you see? People also asked. And so like you're just giving the search engines exactly what they want. You answered a question. And so I went and wrote, I used AI. I wrote 20 blogs in one day. I think it took me two hours, posted them all. I was ranking us on the first page of Google in a week. And then I just kept climbing from there. I was geeking out. And then a year later, blogs I wrote a year ago were starting to trend and I started getting three leads a week just from this one blog from a year ago. It was crazy. Anyway, so I stumbled across. [00:38:16] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think, you know, I think what SEO and AEO is AO is, you know, AI answer engines or geo, which is generative answer engines. I think what they're all telling us now is, you know, go back to 2005, 2006, when WordPress first came out. It was a blogging platform. And so we all had blogs with no featured image on the blog post. There was no homepage. The homepage was just a feed and archive of your blogs. [00:38:44] Speaker B: Right? [00:38:44] Speaker A: We're going back to those days and what they're all saying now is don't write for search engines, don't write for large language models, write for people. Write content that answers the questions that people are asking. And I mean, I did work experience when I was 14 years old at the local public library. And so I have a. For me, that was like an inflection point for me where I. Because people were coming in asking questions and I would pull out the drawer and go through the old Dewey index system and go, oh, come with me. I was a 14 year old nerd, right? Come with me and I'll get you the best parenting book in the library that answers all of these questions. Right? Here it is. And I reflect back on that now and go, I was Google, I was chatgpt back then. Because I've always thought of Google. As a librarian. Your job as a publisher is to tell the librarian what's in the book. Here's the index, here's the table of contents, here's when to recommend it. And then Google's job is to recommend that to people who are asking those questions. And the other reason I think you have to look at the data, the proof that your website just doesn't. How your website looks doesn't matter. Is that Rand Fishkin's just putting out a new book called Zero Click Marketing. He's written it with his coworker, whose name I can't remember. I apologize if she's listening to this, which I'm sure she won't be, but I apologize if you are. Zero Click Marketing. The data now says that 50% of Google searches end without a click. No one is clicking because they're getting the information in the AI summary. They're not clicking out to visit your website. So how do we measure attribution? [00:40:16] Speaker B: You really can't measure attribution. [00:40:18] Speaker A: You can't measure attribution. And think about the display network. If screens go away, how do we advertise to our audience if there's no display network because there's literally no display anymore, right? Like, what does that look like? And so I'm bullish on this as you are that like, content now more than ever, content, like well structured, useful, helpful content, you know, written in a way that is easy to read, easy to understand, and answers questions, is the most important asset that you have in your business. And the good news is you've already got it. It's in your outbox, it's in all the emails that you answer, it's in your head, every conversation you have. Just record it on your B computer, feed it to Victor, have it write a blog post and publish it. You could be publishing multiple blog posts a day. There is no excuse. Right? [00:41:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. So that's what I'm starting to do now because we talked about this online, but I just relaunched as a marketing agency. I left that insurance company and actually what started it was, was that dang article in that magazine because I started putting out content to people saying, hey, start freaking blogging again. Yes, people aren't going to read it, but the AI and the search engines will. And. And when I saw it working, I just kept like updating them, like, oh my gosh, I'm ranking for this mini now. And so people reached out to me and said, will you do it for me? And I was like, I mean, I can, but so I ended up opening, kind of opening on the side again, taking on clients on the side just for that, because it was pretty easy work using it, you know, using AI. I'll tell you where it morphed for me though, because I think we talk about this all the time. AI Slop, right? Like, this generic stuff. So what I started doing was I would. I would have a bunch of interview questions because I can, you know, this. Nobody's doing wearables but me, apparently. And so I would send them questions, and I'd get on Zoom with them and record it, and I'd let them answer the questions with their real knowledge, their real problems they're solving, and they would. I mean, that was my source of truth for at least two months. And so I would literally take that, and we would write so much content out of it and social media posts and everything. So that's how. That's how I forced my clients to do it is like, once a month, we're gonna get on Zoom for an hour, and I'm just gonna interview you. I was like, we'll call it our unofficial podcast. Right. [00:42:38] Speaker A: Well, and. And the thing about. The thing about talking is, you know, I'm training Claude at the moment to sort of be more in my voice. And the thing that, you know, it keeps asking me these questions about sentence structure and, you know, constructs, and I'm like. Like, I. I didn't pay attention in high school, in English class, right? Like. Like I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I just hit the button and I talk. And so when I write a blog post, I don't want to write a blog post. I want to capture my voice. I just want to dictate the thing, Have AI clean up the sentence structure and publish it, because I want it to be authentic. And so the more that you can capture your voice and actually the way that you speak in a recording and have that transcribed, the more AI is going to be able to mirror how you talk and not have AI slop with EM dashes and those great sentence structures that we love. It's not this. It's this. And the harsh truth is this. All that kind of AI slop that's coming out. I mean, one very simple thing you can do is. One very simple thing you can do is just ask whatever AI tool you're using to edit itself before it gives it to you. So just run your eyes over this and pretend that it's come from a junior copywriter who's just used AI to write it. And your job is to clean it up and get rid of all the AI slop. And AI will do that. Most people just don't. Haven't got the time, or there's a skills gap, and they just don't know how to put that final layer into the AI to make sure that they're not getting slop out. I'm glad you mentioned that because that was one question I was going to ask you. What are you most excited about over the coming 90 days or 6 months? [00:44:11] Speaker B: Oh my gosh, like I'm geeking out right now. Like Victor just came in my life at the right time and let me back up real quickly because how I found Victor was an ad. It was an ad on Facebook and I was not as savvy and go high level but this education company that I, you know, locked arms with to do coaching, they had to go high level account. And we had this big challenge coming up in April. We've been working on it since February and there was all this automation built out. Well, it needed to be fixed and our developers like disappeared. It's just a common thing they do is disappear when you need them. And so I was like, okay, I guess I'm gonna go fix this myself. Well, crap started firing before it was supposed to. So the challenge is happening Tuesday, Sunday night on Easter. It says challenge starts in an hour anymore. Everybody's getting text, oh my God. I was like, I have PTSD from this. And so that night I saw an ad from Victor and it was like it was the one where it's, somebody's in Slack saying, you know, panicking about something and the next person says I'm in a meeting and the next person says I can't get to it right now. And then they said at Victor and he was like on it. And I was like, what's this Victor thing? And we were in Slack already. So I just downloaded it because, you know, I got some free credits and I tried it out and the first thing I asked it to do was audit those automations and it didn't only just audit those but 220 before it. And so it audited all Automations and told me what was wrong and then helped me fix them that when I had to do some of it. But then it saved my life in that aspect because I literally did have ptsd. I was so mad, I was like, please do not let me touch this automation again. I'm just sick of it. This is not what I was built for. And so he definitely saved my life there. And, and what's I feel like right now like my big push is Victor to people it's very much, yes, you can learn to build it yourself, but I already know you don't have the time. And so why don't I just take you from level one to level five and give you a Victor and. And solve all your problems and the amount of people, you know, I love making people feel better and to solve their problems. That he really does do that. And. Yeah, and so I love that. I feel like my circle of influence is being blessed from Victor just because they know me, just because I'm vocal about it and I'm willing to share. And so I feel like my little pocket of people right now are just going to just take it to the next level and. And beat their competition and sell more, make more money than they ever have in this next several months. And same for me, like, I didn't know how to price it. But like, you, like, we're doing this, you know, this white glove, hey, we'll come do it for you. For bigger companies that have. I think the biggest one I'll be doing is 175 employees. I called the Victor team to make sure, like, wow, make sure you can handle a company this big. And they're like, oh, yeah, we have a company that has a thousand something employees and we are connected to every GPS and every truck that they have. So we know Victor knows where they're at at all times for their jobs. And I was like, okay, want to make sure? Because I'm gonna go install him. And I just want to make sure. So. Yeah, yeah. And I. And so I. I don't know. I'm walking into bigger things than I've ever walked into before. [00:47:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:36] Speaker B: It's like, is it even marketing anymore? Not really. It's more like production, like creativity, operations. [00:47:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the days of, like, I mean, for me, I never went down the rabbit hole of building custom NAN workflows because I just know that, like, if something breaks, there goes Friday night. I'm like, trying to figure out what's broken for the next four hours. And I know I'm not going to document it. Like, I'm just terrible at documenting shit. Right. So I just want one thing that I can talk to to go fix it. And so like, technically speaking, you could plug Victor into your N8N and Victor could run your N8M workflows for you if you want to build, like those really custom solutions. But I just feel like even that model is going to be outdated where, like the whole rag pipeline thing, Victor's just doing that out of the box. Like open claws kind of put that to bed. Right. And I feel like this is open claw in slack on someone Else's computer. That's the way I think about it. [00:48:24] Speaker B: Literally how I sell it too. Yeah, right. [00:48:27] Speaker A: And. And Pete, you know, the moment also the moment for anyone listening to this, just a little kind of beginner tip for you is the first thing you want to do, and this is kind of how I'm selling Victor now as well. So the first thing you want to do when you sign up for Victor is like, the first thing you want to do is turn Heartbeat off, because otherwise it's going to ping heartbeat every 15 minutes and it's going to burn through your credits real fast. Right. So heartbeat is a. Is a, like a cron job that happens every 15 minutes just to wake the robot up. You don't need it, turn it off, just make it happen once a day and that's going to save you a ton of credits. And the second thing you should do is once you've got Victor doing like two or three things, just ask it to audit its own skills and save tokens. What I'm doing now is I'm actually getting a dump of the skills files out of Victor. I'm putting it into Claude and I'm having Claude rewrite the skills and rewrite the I can architecture and feeding that back to Victor. And I reckon I've saved probably 70% of my credit usage just by optimizing the skills because Victor moves very fast, is a little bit of a cowboy, can just like, go help for leather and get done. But every now and then you've got a. In fact, I'm going to build a repeating task now that it just audits its skills every week just to make sure that it's optimized. It's kind of like optimizing an sop. Right. We don't need to do that step anymore. So take it out of the sop, because someone's just doing that because we wrote it three months ago and no one's bothered to update it. So you need to keep the. [00:49:45] Speaker B: He told me when you gave me that tip, one of the things he told me was I took the SOP for, you know, the skill and it says the exact same thing with less words, which is going to save you the token usage. Because now I don't have to read, you know, 5,000 words. I can read 500 and still get the same job done. [00:50:03] Speaker A: Yep. [00:50:03] Speaker B: And you're going to get the same output. So, yeah, that was great tip. So 78%. It's going to save me 168,000 tokens. [00:50:12] Speaker A: Right. There you go. Happy days and separating skills from context, which is the other thing that I think a lot of people don't sort of understand is that the skill is to, for example, write a blog post. The context is the client that we're writing it for. If you don't actually separate the skill from the context, what happens is any AI, whether it's Victor or whatever you're using, will load up the skill and will have to trawl through all of the clients that you have to find the client that you're writing the blog post for. And that's just going to burn tokens. So separate the context from the skill so that you're only loading the context of that client in when you're writing a blog post for that client and you're ignoring everyone else. So just a couple of things there that you can, if you're going down this rabbit hole, a couple of things you can do to help optimize the performance of Victor and also a couple of ways that you can position it. When someone comes along and says, oh, well, I could just install this myself. I go, yeah, you can come back to me in three weeks when you haven't slept and you've spent three grand on credits and you still. You're going, what the hell's going on? Right. Like, let's get it set up from. It's like you can install your own WordPress website as well. But do you want to do that or do you want to just focus? Right. [00:51:21] Speaker B: Yes. I don't know if we talked about this already, but the other thing I'm having to. And it doesn't take much, but having to wrap these people's brains around the fact that this is not a $20 chat to or $20 clog. This is an AI co worker that you will pay just like you would a VA set. He will work 24, 7 and never volunteer. Right? And so they'll ask me, well, how much do you think he'll cost? And I said, well, I will tell you what he cost me. So he cost me right now 1500 dollars to run my entire agency right now. And I got three of them because he's costing me about the same to run the training. The coaching agency too, or the coaching company. But when I, when I'm meeting with these clients and they're telling me the complexity and the amount of people that are going to be in slack, I'm like, so that large H vac company with 175 employees, 25 are in the office. So I was like, you might Just start there. And I'm guessing I was like, let's see how fast you burn through your, to your, your three tokens and then let's do a calculation and figure out what you're using it for and we'll optimize. I said, But I'm guessing five to 10 times in a month based on how big you are. And he says it's worth it. [00:52:32] Speaker A: A hundred percent. It's going to be, it's going to be at least 10 times cheaper than hiring people and 100 times more reliable and more consistent than hiring humans. Right. To do computer work. I'm not saying we need to fire our staff and we should never hire humans again, but we should utilize the humans in our world to do the work that humans can do, which is to connect with other humans and to think and be strategic and be creative. We shouldn't be hiring humans to operate computers. That's. And the future of work. [00:53:01] Speaker B: I agree on that. [00:53:02] Speaker A: Right. The future of work is headless. You do not need to hire humans to operate computers. And if you are getting paid to operate a computer, in other words, typing on a keyboard, copying and pasting stuff from one platform to another, you're done. You have to upskill because we just don't need you to do that anymore. We need you to do more valuable work. We need you to think. We need you to bring your creativity and your solutions to work. We don't need you to come and [00:53:25] Speaker B: just tap away on the computer and your customer service. So that was one of the problems I had at the insurance company was we have what's called account managers. They kind of handle the back end and the back and forth with the carriers and getting the policy together. And it's 100 computer work. Yeah, 100%. So I, I installed Victor for a small agency over in Houston, and it's him and his wife. And he just does not want to hire an account manager. Manager because he cannot trust them. They always burn them in the most inappropriate times. And he doesn't want to be mean. Like, I'm sorry you have to go to a funeral, but I need this done, you know, like, he doesn't want to do that. And so, yeah, I was like, well, let's just try Victor out and see what he can do. And so he's, he, Victor is his account manager. Like does, you know, and he, but it's his brain where he's consulting the client, giving them 40 years of insurance advice and these big construction companies and manufacturing companies and, and he's Giving like, he's one of the smartest men I know. And so he gets to do what he's really good at, which is advise and know those nuances. While Victor handles the paperwork. [00:54:36] Speaker A: That's right. The AI is handling the paperwork. The AI is. Is logging in and doing the thing. It's. It's. Sometimes it's creating the content, it's emailing the client, it's managing Asana, it's logging into Xero or QuickBooks and send invoice. You know, it's doing all of the stuff that you would have a team of VAs do for you, but they don't forget, they're reliable, it's consistent, and as I said, it's, you know, probably 10 to 20 times cheaper than hiring a team of people. [00:55:01] Speaker B: The other thing. So tech fatigue. I think a lot of us have tech fatigue. A lot of people do. Not just with AI tools that we're using, but just the. All the software that you're getting into for your company. So I had this roofing company up the street friend of mine owns, and he's more like he's already built some AI agents. He, you know, he was building Open Flaw and all that, but the things he builds don't talk to each other. Like, the things he was building don't talk to each other. And. And then his guys go out in the field, you know, they measure the roof. They do all the things. They put it in this app called Company Cam. It has the photos, they transcribe, and with AI does this really cool report. Well, then they need it to go to their estimating software, and then they need that estimating software to put it back into HubSpot, but it doesn't go back into HubSpot the way they want it of, you know, custom values. And so they. They have all these tools. And I said, let's just put Victor right on top as your coo, and he literally natively connects to all of their apps and will put it in the place it's supposed to go. And if you really want to run your marketing bots, you can, but I'm telling you, you can do that too, you know. [00:56:08] Speaker A: Awesome. I love it. Melissa Elizondo, thank you so much for spending some time with us on the agency. Our podcast. I really appreciate you and I appreciate you taking a leap of faith and. And connecting with some weird Aussie dude in a Slack channel a couple of days ago and agreeing to be on my podcast. I really appreciate your time and appreciate [00:56:23] Speaker B: your generosity and coming in to say yes to things. Love it. [00:56:27] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks Melissa. Keep in touch. [00:56:30] Speaker B: All right, you too. [00:56:31] Speaker A: Oh by the way, where can people get in touch with you if they want to reach out and say thanks for this? [00:56:35] Speaker B: So I can be found on Instagram under the real Melissa Elizondo R E A L because I'm human and I'm also on TikTok under the same handle at LinkedIn and Facebook. [00:56:46] Speaker A: So awesome. We will put links to that in the show notes here. All right, bye now. Hey, thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast. I appreciate you being here. If you would like me to sit with you and set up AI in your agency so that you can scale your revenue and your profit without scaling your headcount, just. Just hit me up. Get over to start.agencymavericks.com HL schedule. I know that's a stupid long link. I'll say it again. Start.agencymavericks.com HL- schedule and get on my calendar. Let's have a quick chat and see if you're a good fit. This thing will pay for itself in the first 30 days. It is an absolute no brainer. It is the future of work and I'm working very closely with a very small group of people. There's one of me and I have kids and I have a life that I love. And so once this cohort is full, it's full. Right? And that's not like fake marketing scarcity. It's just the truth. I just want to work really closely with a handful of agencies to help you grow your revenue without growing your headcount. Appreciate you here, subscribe, Share like like do all that kind of stuff. And I look forward to seeing you and speaking with you on the next episode of the Agency, our podcast. I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work.